In Romania people are talking and writing about the fire in Livorno. The European Roma Grassroots association has begun an awareness campaign informing people of the serious abuse carried out in the Tuscan city and the tragedy Victor and Menjii are experiencing due to prejudice;

The members of EveryOne initiated this campaign which is spreading from Bucharest to Timisoara, from Krakow to Braila. We began by writing to the organizations that defend the rights of the Gypsies and by publishing the Livorno episode on Indy Romania. Now everybody in the county where almost three million gypsies live is talking about it and a popular and political movement has emerged manifesting horror and indignation. It is no coincidence that the Romanian authorities have now stigmatized Italy’s attempt to repatriate the gypsies originating from Romania:

it is a deportation procedure that goes against European law. This public opinion movement that has risen from the ashes of the fire in Livorno is an important result, a result we have to support to prevent further abuse and further violations of human rights. Today the Mayor of Livorno, Alessandro Cosimi, who has not realised how serious the events that took place in his city were, is promoting a campaign to clean the streets of child beggars. But, at the same time, he is offering no support to Gypsy families. He has asked, instead, for the children to be placed in the care of social services, and maybe even put up for adoption. All these violations of human rights, for a single man! The National Socialist Party initiated a similar solution before it began the Porrajmos, the extermination of the Gypsies. Taking away their resources for making a living, however meagre, means killing. Begging will disappear, or become less frequent, on its own if the authorities approach these people’s poverty in the only way possible: with aid, subsidies, homes, and serious programmes of integration into the world of labour. And with the setting up of camps with proper facilities: small camps, much easier to manage. As for schooling, it would be better to send teachers to the camps (when the camps exist) and offer supplementary exams. The European culture, which turns children into lambs and then into sheep, is too different from the Gypsy culture, which considers freedom and creativity fundamental values in a child’s growth. Gypsies youths, in fact, are able to marry according to natural law: when they reach puberty. The Gypsy people live according to natural laws, while other nations fight such laws. With nuclear energy, genetics, bioengineering and the destruction of resources, they are leading our planet towards its demise. They are criminals from several points of view, not only where human rights are concerned. Over the last few weeks we have offered Livorno and its authorities a lesson in civil behaviour which could have opened new doors and led to a better coexistence with gypsies, something which will take place anyway, as written in the history of migrating peoples, history that has always allowed humanity to regenerate and survive. I believe the mayor and authorities of Livorno represent a negative example of the oppression of the poor, the “different” and the weak. It is a rare example of a lack of humanity, so much so that even in Romania, where coexistence with gypsies is not without its problems, spontaneous protests have been raised. Livorno is becoming a European example of inhumanity and ruthlessness and it is to be hoped that the citizens of this “beautiful rumbling city” will stop this policy of persecution and death and let themselves be represented by men and women who represent their spirit of equality and welcome. The actions of the present city leaders put Italy in a bad light, one of incivility and cruelty that recalls darker years. In the “Corriere della Sera” the outpourings of a single man were published on the same page as those of Beppe Grillo, which very likely instigated the new fire at Casoria. A page that encloses our shame. It is not the voice of Livorno, but the voice of a man incapable of distinguishing the history of an evolving city, incapable of realising that without respect for human rights one slips into darkness and disappears. Europe is alive - and on the move. One must not defend one’s own “blood”, one’s own “nation”, one’s personal idea of “homeland” and “family”. Whenever civilizations have tightened their defences to protect these false ideals, they have fallen into a decline. At the present barely 100,000 gypsies live in Italy: a number that would be easy to deal with using a humanitarian approach. If the hundreds of millions of euros invested by local and national authorities to “fight” the Gypsies were invested in facilitating their insertion and integration, in respect of a civilization, there would be no “gypsy problem” to solve. We would have the 10,000 camps (some transit camps, others more permanent) that existed before fascism took them from the nomads. There would be more street artists, of course, gypsy women reading palms and children asking for the odd coin while learning the language and making friends. Only in our culture is the street a place of transit. Only in our culture are camps inhospitable places. Only in our culture is begging humiliating. In the nomads’ world, the street is life, the camp is home, begging and small services of music, poetry and magic are ways of surviving on the cheap, picking up the crumbs so the world will not be depleted of its natural resources. Let us remember also that Gypsies are a proud people. People who cultivate peace and respect for life as the greatest possessions, as sublime ethical and religious values. If however, oppression tries to destroy them, they will rebel, as they have every right to: it is laid down in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And when Gypsies are forced to face weapons, they are transformed. The British traveller and chronicler Thomas Coryat saw them in this role and wrote: “one has never seen such a tremendous army”. The Bohemians, the King’s Guards, the Ciganos, the Ingermanland Dragoons characterized the history of Europe with their heroism in battle. And the partisan gypsies in Rakoczy’s service are still remembered in the words of a gypsy song:

“Fire, dear fire/I will build two homes for you/ I will build two towers for you / with the large heads of the Turks / with the arms of the Kurutz soldiers / with the feet of the Saxons.”

And we mustn’t forget it was the gypsies interned in Auschwitz who fought the greatest, most moving and heroic battle against Hitler’s butchers on May 16th, 1944. The SS rounded them up to take them to their deaths in the gas chambers of Krematorium IV, but the gypsy men and women had organized a desperate battle in an attempt to protect their children. They had fashioned makeshift weapons and they stood up to the most powerful and well-organized murderers of all time. They did not die as animals for slaughter, but they fought hard against their persecutors, spilling a great deal of German blood in the Death Factory. Two generations later, the Gypsies find themselves in the same conditions of hardship, bearing the same yoke of prejudice and cruelty they were burdened with back then. We were not able to be at their side during the glorious and terrible days of Auschwitz, but we can be now, we stand by them, ready to defend the lives of their children and the inheritance of their forgotten heroes.

The Fire of Livorno. European symbol of a new persecution of Gypsy people

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